Mendoza

Mendoza is a famous wine-producing region, so I obliged, sampling the wines, attending a Grape Harvest festival, and touring some wineries, or bodegas. (Say it with me now: bohhh de-ga.)

Let me just get this out of my system:



Hahaha, I'm such an asshole.

I visited three bodegas, and they were nothing like that. The first one was a huge, industrial operation, owned by the same company that owns Bailey's and Smirnoff and other liquor brands. Here's what I learned:

Red wines: Grapes are crushed, stems separated out. Seeds and skin are left in to give the wine its color. Ferments for 12-15 days in these huge, Strange Brew-esque tanks. After that it's table wine, and you can drink it.

White wines: Same, but only the juice of the grapes is used, not the seeds or skin. For sparkling whites, they do a second fermentation to get the bubbles. (''Actually, all champagnes are French. Named after the region. Anything else is really just a...sparkling white wine.'')

But the reserves, the good, full-bodied wines, are aged in French oak barrels for 12-18 months. The barrels must be kept underground at cool temperatures and 80% humidity. This place had an enormous underground warehouse, with thousands of barrels stacked ceiling high. Each barrel is only used twice; after that it loses the ability to impart the proper flavor to the wine. And! The barrels aren't glued or nailed together or anything. They're just held together by the pressure of the metal rings around them and the humidity.

We learned how to properly taste wine, a procedure that consists of four steps:

1) Holding the glass by the stem so as not to alter the temperature of the wine, lift it up to natural light, or to something white. Examine the color for...something.
2) Without swirling the wine, smell it and get your first impressions. Nod pensively.
3) Swirl the wine and observe how the tears run down the inside of the glass. If they run fast, it's a young wine, a table wine. Sniff the wine again, now that it's been opened. Make an appreciative noise.
4) Take a sip, letting the wine linger on your tongue. Swallow. Nod again.

After the big, industrial bodega, we went to a small, organic one. This one looked like how I'd imagined a winery, more A Walk in the Clouds. Rows of grape vines stretching into the distance, a quiet, country feel. They keep pests -- birds, insects, and bacteria -- in harmony by planting olive trees around the edge of the vineyards, a walnut tree in the middle, and roses at the end of each row of vines. If bad bugs come, they'll attack the roses first, and the winery workers will know there's a problem. At this bodega, they fermented the wine in cement tanks, lined with a neutral epoxy. Cement!

Malbec grapes:

Two women from the hostel and I had accidentally all dressed the same, down to the purple toenail polish, so we took a picture.

At the last winery, we had the most redonkulous lunch. We arrived to a long table covered in cheeses, beans, vegetables, spreads, breads, dried fruit, and, or course, wine.

The week I was in Mendoza coincided with the Vendimia, or Grape Harvest festival. Though as far as I could tell, it had more to do with beauty queens, reinas, than grapes. There are 18 reinas, one from each wine-producing region, I guess? Anyway, there's a week leading up to these parades, in which each reina gets a themed float, and they throw grapes, pears, walnuts, juice boxes, cookies, and more to the crowd, while blowing kisses and waving.

People would hold out their hands, or hold up baskets tied to poles, to get treats from the reinas. This wee supplicant was especially adorable, sitting on her father's shoulders, stretching out her cupped palms, Oliver Twist style:

After six weeks in National Parks and small towns, though, Mendoza felt too big and chaotic, so I left it for Uspallata, a two-road town nearby...

Tierra del Fuego

The bus from El Calafate to Ushuaia took 20 HOURS, thanks to a flat tire and the ridiculous charade that is customs. We had to pass through a tiny slice of Chile and then back into Argentina, which means going through customs TWICE. Once again, the damn Chileans confiscated my carrot, even though it was never going to touch Chilean soil. Jerks.

Moving on: I sat next to a Swiss woman on the bus, also traveling solo. I like to ask people about their nation's political structure (what?), and did you know that Switzerland has seven presidents?!? Seven! At the same time! And they speak four languages in Switzerland and at least one president has to be from each region.

Crossing the Strait of Magellan:

Random: From the Ushuaia supermarket, this is either a product placement FAIL or a product placement win. Thoughts?

I was hiking with some friendly Brits, Robin and Tom, in Tierra del Fuego National Park when I heard about the 8.8 earthquake that had hit Chile that morning. Robin casually mentioned that her dad had texted her asking if she was ok. It was creepy to hear of the quake because I'd been about to go to Valparaíso, Chile, but at the last minute decided to go to Ushuaia.

On that note, on to my trivial day: Decided to go hiking at 10:40am. Ran upstairs to get my stuff in time for the 11:00 shuttle, and totally walked in on two people banging in the hostel dorm room. People: if you're going to bang, get a private room. Spare the rest of us, and don't do it in a dorm.

Anyhoo, I met the two friendly Brits at the trailhead and hiked with them for most of the day. Robin had a perfect Kiera Knightly accent which I found posh and enchanting. Like the wonk that I am, I asked them about the British political system. They can only vote for their representative (which they call their PM)! That's it! Then the party PM's choose the Prime Minister, who is the party's leader. But he doesn't have any law-making or veto power; he just leads the party and sets their agenda. Officially the Queen has veto power, but apparently she's just a figurehead who signs what's put in front of her. Anyway, I was astounded by how little the British citizens are allowed to be involved in policy making. They only get to vote for their district's guy, and only once every five years. No president, no ballot measures, nothing!

We first hiked to a low mirador that afforded a pretty view of a calm channel (Beagle?), with mountains (end of the Andes?) in the background. The hike consisted of a fairly muddy trail that wound through coihue forest. Other than the coihue trees, there was tiny green groundcover, no bigger than baby spinach. That's it, no flora between those two sizes: trees and greens.

Then we hiked a 5-mile trail that hugged the coast. This was beautiful; lagoons of deep green, jutting rocks that were, oddly, Statue-of-Liberty green. Calm water. Sharp, salty smell. Schags would have loved it.

We got to a bus stop in time for the 5:00pm return shuttle, but the end of Route 3, the end of the southern-most highway in the world, was only 30 minutes farther on. I thought to myself: What would the Boy do? Go big or go home, that's what. So I opted to hike on.

I spent an hour chilling at the final viewpoint, watching ducks, seagulls, geese, and bunnies (bunnies, it must be bunniiiiies!).

The next day I saw penguins! But on the way there we got a flat tire and when everyone piled out of the van I took this picture for Holly, Schags, Jessica, and Katy:

There's a third girl in the trio who left her book in the car.

On to the penguins! We took a 10-minute boat ride (in the sort of boat Dad would almost refer to as a Chuck Norris assault raft) to a small island that is a nature reserve. There were two kinds of penguins on the island: Magellan and something else I forgot. Not Emperor, unfortunately, as those only live in Antarctica.

Hee hee! Penguins are so comical! Waddling and flapping. Hilarious. Sometimes they'd trip, landing on their fat bellies, then spring right up and continue their tottering. To enter the ocean, they'd shuffle in until they fell over onto their bellies, and then swim from there. Swimming, they had the profile of ducks.

Finally, remember how I said Patagonia was windy? This is how the trees grow here, because of the wind:

Cerro Torre and Cerro Fitz Roy

So. In 1976, Mom and Dad visited Patagonia and hiked to the famed peaks known as Cerro Torre and Cerro Fitz Roy. They had a friend turn their photos of Cerro Torre into a painting, which hung in our living room my entire childhood. One by one, each of us kids have made the pilgrimage to these mountains to see them for ourselves. Some of us got pwned by cloudcover, some of us got lucky. I got lucky.

 

 

As the bus approached the town of El Chaltén, both Cerro Torre and Cerro Fitz Roy were completely visible. Stunningly clear blue skies. Like Ashland in August, except it was 70 degrees out instead of 90. I dropped my backpack off at the hostel, repacked my daypack, and bought a sandwich on the way out of town, booking it straight for Laguna Torre, at the base of Cerro Torre.

Tangent: to get to the trailhead, you just walk out of town. This amused me because as a kid I had these independence fantasies of just leaving the house, walking till I hit the foothills of the Siskiyous, and keeping on until I was in the forest and could live off the land, like the boy in My Side of the Mountain. I love how there is a whole genre of children's literature devoted to this escapist/naturalist/transcendentalist fantasy. Island of the Blue Dolphins, Hatchet, Brian's Winter (who are we kidding -- anything written by Gary Paulsen), Sparrow Hawk Red, even The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. I don't think it's a coincidence that I read those books around the same time I made elaborate (though, tragically, never realized) plans for a tree fort.

I digress. For the first hour of the hike, you climb out of the valley containing El Chaltén. The trail was dusty at first, going through an area of grass, spiky shrubs, and wildflowers. Then it entered a leafy forest, and then bam! You crest the little pass leading down into the river valley approaching the Laguna Torre and there it is: the Living Room Painting. Live, in front of me! I actually gasped and my eyes teared up. I spent a few awed minutes at the mirador, staring at the mountains, munching almonds, and taking copious photos.

But the mirador is not close enough, no. So I pressed on. One cool thing about this hike is that for the entire second hour, as you make your way through the river valley (landscape: shoulder-height-bonzai-looking-tree forest), you can see Cerro Torre. You just get closer and closer and the mountain gets bigger and bigger. Giddy with joy, when no one was looking I couldn't help myself from stretching my palms to the sky in celebration.

Finally I arrived at Laguna Torre, a small lake fed by the glacier at the base of the mountain. Thar she blows. Amazing.

 

  

I took off my shoes and ate lunch on a warm rock as I soaked up the mind-blowing view of majestic Cerro Torre. I just sat there for an hour staring at the mountain, the glacier, the lake, the sky. I can't believe I was actually seeing it. Live! Finally! It felt oddly like coming home, though I'd never been here before.

The next day I hiked to Cerro Fitz Roy, the taller of the two mountains (clocking in at 11,073 feet; Torre is 10,280), and the main attraction. The hike is 25 kilometers/15.5 miles round-trip. I've never hiked that far in one day, and I felt quite baller that I was able to do it.

I love it when there is no one on the trail but me. When it's just me and my thoughts and the soft tamping of my footsteps on the forest floor. And one of the things about a trail that's 15.5 miles round-trip is that it weeds out anyone who doesn't want to hike for seven hours (or hike for three and camp), so while I definitely saw other hikers on the trail, I also had the trail to myself quite a bit.

As with the Cerro Torre hike, for the first hour you climb out of the valley containing El Chaltén. The trail was pleasantly dry, with low shrubs and something that smelled sticky sweet. Then the trail entered leafy woods with bright green groundcover. I saw a woodpecker! Proud black body and shock of stiff red mohawk.

About an hour into the hike the trail splits and you can either go to the Laguna Capri campsite or to the first mirador. I went to the first mirador. Fitz Roy was fully visible, though the sky behind it was all washed out.

After the mirador you walk along a ridge above a river valley, affording impressive views of the river and the cliffs on the other side. Then you descend into the river valley. This part is mostly flat, with Alice in Wonderland-esque tunnels of dark green shrub. Two and a half hours in is the second campsite, and the beginning of the climb to the Laguna de Los Tres, with the final view of Fitz Roy. This last hour is straight up, essentially a long, switchbacky flight of rock stairs. You climb and climb, finally able to see all the way back down the way you came: Laguna Capri, and also the Laguna Hija and Laguna Madre.

At the top of this last, steep climb is a small, glacier-fed lake at the base of Fitz Roy. The lake is at the bottom of a little basin whose steep sides are covered in boulders worn smooth by years of snow and glaciers. Tired, I gratefully used one of the boulders as a back rest while I ate lunch. Then I just sat there for an hour and a half, watching the clouds swirl around the top of Fitz Roy. Like a shy bride, Fitz Roy never fully revealed it's face while I was at there that day, but it was still amazing. I never cease to be awed by the sheer immensity of rock faces like that.

The next day was clear, so I did half the hike I'd done the day before, this time going to Laguna Capri instead of the mirador. After a mere hour and fifteen minute hike, I had all afternoon to stare at a fully revealed Fitz Roy against a background of blue sky. First I ate lunch on a rock being lapped by the Laguna Capri, then I walked down a little farther to a beach, took of my shoes, buried my toes in the sun-warmed sand, and stared at the mountain.

The sky was summer blue, with the exception of a handful of fluffy clouds barely above the horizon, moving steadily from south to north (I think; from left to right anyway). When they got to Fitz Roy, the clouds did a peculiar thing, which I will attempt to capture here. They would pass behind all the other peaks, but when they came to Fitz Roy, it was as if they were drawn to something inside the head of the mountain. They'd slow their pace and start creeping up Fitz Roy's back, slinking over the mountain's left shoulder, moving like the Smoke Monster from FernGully -- a sort of slow, viscous oozing. The northward tug of the wind would cause the lingering cloud to split into tendrils, some reluctantly peeling off, the others still desperately curling around the tip of the mountain. It was a fascinating and beautiful dance. And I lay on the beach and watched it for an hour and a half.

 

  

 

Back in town, I went to a waffle place and had half a garlic-olive-tomato pizza and some chocolate-covered waffles at the same time. Also two bottles(!) of pomelo soda. That, my friends, is the definition of winning at life.

But wait, there's more! The next day I went on a mini trek over the Viedma Glacier.

 

It was cool; you take a ferry across the lake -- which has that milky opacity of glacier-fed lakes and was the exact color of a sage leaf -- and ''dock'' against some tires bolted to the rock a little ways away from the glacier. The glacier is 90 ft - 150 ft high, and it extends 330 ft below the surface of the lake! The surface area of the glacier was something crazy like 200 square km. Our guide said that the glacier is shrinking, that a square meter of glacier weighs a ton(!), and that 20,000 years ago the glacier was as high as the hills around the lake!

So: glaciers. Not smooth! The surface was more like the texture of a bad sno-cone -- you know, the kind they make using a blender instead of a shave-ice machine -- only bigger. And all over the glacier were little rivulets of water running off. Sometimes they flow along the surface, sometimes they bore tunnels through the middle of the glacier, and sometimes they bore down to the bottom and run between the rock and the glacier.

There was a tunnel, and kick-ass crevasses of cool, icy blue.

  

  

There was also a cave where the glacier had peeled up off the rock, melted from beneath really, and we could walk in maybe 30 yards. The ceiling was smooth solid ice, and you could look up and see air bubbles and rocks suspended in it. There was also a fine, wet layer of pulverized-rock clay coating the ceiling in places. Water shot out of chutes into a pool at one end of the cave. It was surreal.

 

One my last day in El Chaltén I went on a short hike that afforded a view of the entire Fitz Roy range.

The hostel owner said that there are maybe 10 perfectly clear days here in a season. When the Boy was here for a week last year, it was clear only on the first and last days, and total shit in between. When Brian was here two years before that, he didn't see the mountains at all, except out the back of the bus window as he was leaving. Climbers wait weeks for the perfect opportunity to climb these peaks. And weather forcasts are completely useless; the weather here simply can't be predicted.

Like I said, I got lucky.

Glaciar Perito Moreno

The Perito Moreno glacier is by far the coolest thing I have seen so far. It's massive. Unfathomably large. Truly too big to conceive of.

According to Wikipedia:

Surface area: 97 square miles
Length: 19 miles
Width: 3 miles
Height above water: 240 feet
Depth below water: 558 feet

People! That means the face of the glacier is 24 stories tall!

It was jagged, ranging in color from blinding white to cool blue in the cracks to a deep blue-green that -- I'm sorry -- was the exact color of a Gusher. There were also cinnamon streaks mixed in, where dirt had been pressed between layers of ice. Sometimes I'd try to look at it like a Jackson Pollack painting, first focusing on all the tan tips, then the darkest of the shadow blues, then the faintest blues. Everytime I looked at it I saw something new.

Every so often a huge chunk of ice would calve off and crash into the lake below, followed by a thunderous crack. The smaller pieces of ice made even louder cracks, like rifle fire. Oddly, there was about a one-second lag between when the ice hit the water and when you could hear the impact.

I have a weakness for taking pictures of gratuitous signage:

Caitlin and I spent a good five hours staring at the glacier. We went in the afternoon, when there are fewer people, and for a while we had an entire viewpoint balcony to ourselves. As we were sitting there, enjoying the silent beauty of the glacier and waiting for the next crash, I found myself wishing that I had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. I mean, how cool would it be to fire a grenade into the base of the glacier and watch a Dexter-Horton sized mass of ice blow off in slow motion, the creak turning into a wail as the chunk accelerated toward the lake in an enormous spray of water and ice? Made me think of that Onion article, ''Dinosaurs Sadly Extinct Before Invention of Bazooka.''